Plants absorb carbon dioxide to fuel their growth. As humans increase the amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, more will be available to vegetation around the world. But according to a new study, too much carbon dioxide might eventually lead to plants that are deficient in key nutrients for humans, which could be especially detrimental in the developing world.

In the Pacific Northwest, oozing volcanic basalts erupted over the landscape during the middle Miocene, layering a sequence of 43 distinct strata, comprising roughly 350 individual flows, up to 2 kilometers thick over roughly 210,000 square kilometers. The timeline over which all that rock, known as the Columbia River Basalt Group (CRBG), piled up — and the pace at which it did so — hasn’t been as clear as scientists would like, in part because prior dates for the lava flows have come with large uncertainties. But in a new study in Science Advances, researchers have reduced those uncertainties and shown that the vast majority of the massive CRBG was deposited in less than a million years.

The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, and fall sea-ice extents have been trending downward for decades. But while the region is heating up, that northerly warming seems to be having the opposite effect on some midlatitude locations: Parts of Siberia near the Ural Mountains, for example, have had anomalously cold winters in recent decades.

Two distinct images come to mind when I think of Warren Huff, my former doctoral adviser: one in which he is enthusiastically teaching and mentoring students both in and out of the classroom, and one in which he is sitting around a fire, playing guitar and leading a group of geologists in science-themed sing-alongs. Both images encapsulate the kind of person he is: a leading scholar in the field of clay mineralogy who lives life with gusto.

Maybe it was the summer camping trips with his family along the Pacific coast, or perhaps surfing off Santa Barbara, Calif., during college, but Gary Griggs always gravitated to the ocean. He turned that love into a career and has spent the last 50 years teaching about the oceans and coasts at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

In the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, complex and dynamic interactions among the atmosphere, cryosphere, and surface and deep ocean waters play an important role in climate. Although it covers only a quarter of Earth’s oceanic surface area, the Southern Ocean — with its cold temperatures and carbon-sucking algal blooms — has been estimated to take up 40 percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. However, new data collected by a fleet of autonomous floating sensors show that the Southern Ocean is taking up significantly less carbon than scientists thought.

The Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project (SOCCOM) set out four years ago to study the Southern Ocean and its role and influence on global climate. The main mission of the project was to increase Southern Ocean observations, especially during the frigid winter months, to better understand climate change and biogeochemistry.

Errant asteroids and toxic emissions from volcanic eruptions are the usual suspects in mass extinctions. But during the Ordovician, it was a million-year stretch of cooling ushered in by proliferating algae that triggered a worldwide glaciation and extinction event, according to a new study.

As tectonic plates collide and sink in subduction zones, huge megathrust earthquakes can produce devastation above. Yet, there are many unknown factors that control how much energy is released in each earthquake. Now, a team of scientists has come up with a new model to help crack the complexity and nature of megathrust earthquakes using global historical records.